The Universe in a Nutshell

Albert Einstein, the discoverer of the special and general theories of relativity, was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879, but the following year the family moved to Munich, where his father Hermann and Uncle Jacob founded a small and lively group. Not a very successful electrical business. Albert was no child prodigy, but the claim that he did poorly in school seems like an exaggeration. In 1894, his father's business failed and the family moved to Milan. His parents decided he should stay behind to finish school, but he didn't like her tyranny, and within months he left to join his family in Italy. Later he completed his education in Zurich, graduating from the prestigious Federal School of Education, better known as ETH, in 1900. His polemical nature and hatred of authority did not make him likable to professors at ETH and none of them offered him an assistant position, which is the usual path to an academic career. Two years later, he finally managed to get a junior position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. While in this position, in 1905 he wrote three papers that established him as one of the world's leading scientists and began two conceptual revolutions—two revolutions that changed our understanding of time, space, and reality itself.